Nothing exists in this world but me and my bed…” (p. 141).

With a cold"--she spoke evenly, lowering her eyes a little--"now is the hardest time. Maybe even harder than dying. But this is probably as bad as it can get. You might come to fear the next time you get a cold; it will be as bad as this, but if you just hold steady, it won't be. For the rest of your life. That's how it works. You could take the negative view and live in fear: Will it happen again? But it won't hurt so much if you just accept it as a part of life." With that she looked up at me, smiling.

Good tea is eloquent enough, it turns out, to change a person's mind.

No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.

Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated.

If you don’t say what you’re thinking, you end up lying when you really need to speak up.

Ultimately, though, it's living people that frighten me the most. It's always seemed to me that nothing could be scarier than a person, because as dreadful places can be, they're still just places; and no matter how awful ghosts might seem, they're just dead people. I always thought that the most terrifying things anyone could ever think up were the things living people came up with.